Archive for the ‘Entanglement’ Category

“Multiple teams of scientists can’t agree on how fast the Universe expands. Dark matter may unlock why.There’s an enormous controversy in astrophysics today over how quickly the Universe is expanding. One camp of scientists, the same camp that won the Nobel Prize for discovering dark energy, measured the expansion rate to be 73 km/s/Mpc, with an uncertainty of only 2.4%. But a second method, based on the leftover relics from the Big Bang, reveals an answer that’s incompatibly lower at 67 km/s/Mpc, with an uncertainty of only 1%. It’s possible that one of the teams has an unidentified error that’s causing this discrepancy, but independent checks have failed to show any cracks in either analysis. Instead, new physics might be the culprit. If so, we just might have our first real clue to how dark matter might be detected.”

20 years ago it was peer-reviewed published, by a number of teams that we were in an ever faster expanding universe (right). The Physics Nobel was given for that to a Berkeley team and to an Australian team. There are now several methods to prove this accelerating expansion, and they (roughly) agree.

Notice the striking differences between different models in the past; only a Universe with dark energy matches our observations. Possible fates of the expanding Universe which used to be considered were, ironically enough, only the three on the left, which are now excluded. Image credit: The Cosmic Perspective / Jeffrey O. Bennett, Megan O. Donahue, Nicholas Schneider and Mark Voit.

Three main classes of possibilities for why the Universe appears to accelerate have been considered:

Vacuum energy, like a cosmological constant, is energy inherent to space itself, and drives the Universe’s expansion. (This idea comes back to Einstein who introduced a “Cosmological Constant” in the basic gravitational equation… To make the universe static, a weird idea akin to crystal sphere of Ptolemaic astronomy; later Einstein realized that, had he not done that, he could have posed as real smart by predicting the expansion of the universe… So he called it, in a self-congratulating way, his “greatest mistake”… However, in the last 20 years, the “greatest mistake” has turned to be viewed as a master stroke…).

Dynamical dark energy, driven by some kind of field that changes over time, could lead to differences in the Universe’s expansion rate depending on when/how you measure it. (Also called “quintessence”; not really different from 1), from my point of view!)

General Relativity could be wrong, and a modification to gravity might explain what appears to us as an apparent acceleration. (However, the basic idea of the theory of gravitation is so simplest, it’s hard to see how it could be wrong, as long as one doesn’t introduce Quantum effects… Which is exactly what I do! In my own theory, said effect occur only at large cosmic distances, on the scale of large galaxies)

Ethan: “At the dawn of 2018, however, the controversy over the expanding Universe might threaten that picture. Our Universe, made up of 68% dark energy, 27% dark matter, and just 5% of all the “normal” stuff (including stars, planets, gas, dust, plasma, black holes, etc.), should be expanding at the same rate regardless of the method you use to measure it. At least, that would be the case if dark energy were truly a cosmological constant, and if dark matter were truly cold and collisionless, interacting only gravitationally. If everyone measured the same rate for the expanding Universe, there would be nothing to challenge this picture, known as standard (or “vanilla”) ΛCDM.

But everyone doesn’t measure the same rate.”

The standard, oldest, method of measuring the Hubble cosmic expansion rate is through a method known as the cosmic distance ladder. The simplest version only has three rungs. First, you measure the distances to nearby stars directly, through parallax, the variation of the angle of elevation during the year, as the Earth goes around its orbit. Most specifically you measure the distance to the long-period Cepheid stars like this. Cepheids are “standard candles”; they are stars whose luminosities vary, but their maximum power doesn’t, so we can know how far they are by looking how much they shine. Second, you then measure other properties of those same types of Cepheid stars in nearby galaxies, learning how far away those galaxies are. And lastly, in some of those galaxies, you’ll have a specific class of supernovae known as Type Ia supernovae. Those supernovae explode exactly when they accrete 1.4 solar mass, from another orbiting star (a theory of Indian Nobel Chandrasekhar, who taught at the University of Chicago). One can see these 1a supernovae all over the universe. Inside the Milky Way, as well as many of billions of light years away. With just these three steps, you can measure the expanding Universe, arriving at a result of 73.24 ± 1.74 km/s/Mpc.

The other methods makes all sorts of suppositions about the early universe. I view it as a miracle that it is as close as it is: 66.9 km/s/Megaparsec…

Ethan concludes that: “Currently, the fact that distance ladder measurements say the Universe expands 9% faster than the leftover relic method is one of the greatest puzzles in modern cosmology. Whether that’s because there’s a systematic error in one of the two methods used to measure the expansion rate or because there’s new physics afoot is still undetermined, but it’s vital to remain open-minded to both possibilities. As improvements are made to parallax data, as more Cepheids are found, and as we come to better understand the rungs of the distance ladder, it becomes harder and harder to justify blaming systematics. The resolution to this paradox may be new physics, after all. And if it is, it just might teach us something about the dark side of the Universe.”

My comment: The QUANTUM INTERACTION CHANGES EVERYTHING:

My own starting point is a revision of Quantum Mechanics: I simply assume that Newton was right (that’s supposed to be a joke, but with wisdom attached). Newton described his own theory of gravitation to be absurd (the basic equation, F = M1 M2/dd. where d was the distance was from a French astronomer, Ishmael Boulliau, as Newton himself said. Actually this “Bullaldius” then spoiled his basic correct reasoning with a number of absurdities which Newton corrected).

Newton was actually insulting against his own theory. He said no one with the slightest understanding of philosophy would assume that gravitation was instantaneous.

Newton’s condemnation was resolved by Laplace, a century later. Laplace just introduced a finite speed for the propagation of the gravitational field. That implied gravitational waves, for the same reason as a whip makes waves.

We are in a similar situation now. Present Quantum Physics assumes that the Quantum Interaction (the one which carries Quantum Entanglement) is instantaneous. This is absurd for exactly the same reason Newton presented, and Laplace took seriously, for gravitation.

Supposing that the Quantum Interaction has a finite speed (it could be bigger than 10^23c, where c is the speed of light.

Supposing this implies (after a number of logical and plausible steps) both Dark Matter and Dark Energy. It is worth looking at. But let’s remember the telescope (which could have been invented in antiquity) was invented not to prove that the Moon was not a crystal ball, but simply to make money (by distinguishing first which sort of cargo was coming back from the Indies).

We see what we want to see, because that’s we have been taught to see, we search what we want to search, because that’s what we have been taught to search. Keeping an open mind is great, but a fully open mind is a most disturbing thing…

There are theories everywhere, and the more ingrained they are, the more suspiciously they should be looked at. From the basic equations of relativity it is clear that if one adds speeds less than the speed of light, one will get a speed less than the speed of light. It is also clear that adding impulse to a mass will make it more massive, while its speed will asymptotically approach that of light (and, as I explained, the reason is intuitive, from Time Dilation).

The subject is not all sci-fi: modern cosmology brazenly assumes that space itself, after the alleged Big Bang, expanded at a speed at least 10^23 c (something like one hundred thousand billion billions time the speed of light c). The grossest, yet simplest, proof of that is simple: the observable universe is roughly 100 billion light years across, and it is ten billion years old. Thus it expanded at the minimum average clip of ten billion light years, every billion years. 100c/10 = 10c, according to standard cosmology. One could furiously imagine a spaceship somehow surfing on a wave of warped space, expanding for the same obscure reason.

The question naturally arises whether velocities which are greater than that of light could ever possibly be obtained in other ways. For example, are there communication speeds faster than light? (Throwing some material across will not work: its mass will increase, while its speed stays less than c.)

Textbooks say it’s not possible. There is actually a “proof” of that alleged impossibility, dating all the way back to Einstein (1907) and Tolman (1917). The mathematics are trivial (they are reproduced in my picture below). But the interpretation is apparently less so. Wikipedia weirdly claims that faster than light communications would allow to travel back in time. No. One could synchronize all clocks on all planets in the galaxies, and having faster than light communications would not change anything. Why? Time is local, faster than light data travel is nonlocal.

The problem of faster than light communications can be attacked in the following manner.

Consider two points A and B on the X axis of the system S, and suppose that some impulse originates at A, travels to B with the velocity u and at B produces some observable phenomenon, the starting of the impulse at A and the resulting phenomenon at B thus being connected by the relation of cause and effect. The time elapsing between the cause and its effect as measured in the units of system S will evidently be as follows in the calligraphy below. Then I use the usual Relativity formula (due to Lorentz) of time as it elapses in S’:

Equations help, but they are neither the beginning, nor the end of a story. Just an abstraction of it. The cult of equations is naive, interpretation is everything. The same thing, more generally, holds for models.
As Tolman put it in 1917: “Let us suppose now that there are no limits to the possible magnitude of the velocities u and V, and in particular that the causal impulse can travel from A to B with a velocity u greater than that of light. It is evident that we could then take a velocity u great enough uV/C^2 will be greater than one. so that Delta(t) would become negative. In other words, for an observer in system S’ the effect which occurs at B would precede in time its cause which originates at A.”

I quote Tolman, because he is generally viewed as the one having definitively established the impossibility of faster than light communications. Tolman, though is not so sure; in his next sentence he turns out wishy washy: “Such a condition of affairs might not be a logical impossibility; nevertheless its extraordinary nature might incline us to believe that no causal impulse can travel with a velocity greater than that of light.”

Actually it is an effect those who have seen movies running in reverse are familiar with. Causality apparently running in reverse is no more surprising than the fact that two events at x1 and x2 which are simultaneous in S are separated by: (x1-x2) (V/square root (1-VV/CC)). That introduces a sort of fake, or apparent causality, sometimes this before that, sometimes that before this.

(The computation is straightforward and found in Tolman’s own textbook; it originated with Henri Poincaré.[9][10] In 1898 Poincaré argued that the postulate of light speed constancy in all directions is useful to formulate physical laws in a simple way. He also showed that the definition of simultaneity of events at different places is only a convention.[11]) . Notice that, in the case of simultaneity, the signs of V and (x1-x2) matter. Basically, depending upon how V moves, light in S going to S’ takes more time to catch up with the moving frame, and the more so, the further it is, the same exact effect which explains the nil result in the Michelson-Morley interferometer; there is an underlying logic below all of this, and it’s always the same).

Tolman’s argumentation about the impossibility of faster than light communications is, in the end, purely philosophical and fully inconsistent with the closely related, and fully mainstream, relativity of simultaneousness.

Poincaré in 1900 proposed the following convention for defining clock synchronisation: 2 observers A and B, which are moving in space (which Poincaré called the aether), synchronise their clocks by means of optical signals. They believe to be at rest in space (“the aether”) from not moving relative to distant galaxies or the Cosmic Radiation Background and assume that the speed of light is constant in all directions. Therefore, they have to consider only the transmission time of the signals and then crossing their observations to examine whether their clocks are synchronous.

“Let us suppose that there are some observers placed at various points, and they synchronize their clocks using light signals. They attempt to adjust the measured transmission time of the signals, but they are not aware of their common motion, and consequently believe that the signals travel equally fast in both directions. They perform observations of crossing signals, one traveling from A to B, followed by another traveling from B to A.”

In 1904 Poincaré illustrated the same procedure in the following way:

“Imagine two observers who wish to adjust their timepieces by optical signals; they exchange signals, but as they know that the transmission of light is not instantaneous, they are careful to cross them. When station B perceives the signal from station A, its clock should not mark the same hour as that of station A at the moment of sending the signal, but this hour augmented by a constant representing the duration of the transmission. Suppose, for example, that station A sends its signal when its clock marks the hour 0, and that station B perceives it when its clock marks the hour t. The clocks are adjusted if the slowness equal to t represents the duration of the transmission, and to verify it, station B sends in its turn a signal when its clock marks 0; then station A should perceive it when its clock marks t. The timepieces are then adjusted. And in fact they mark the same hour at the same physical instant, but on the one condition, that the two stations are fixed. Otherwise the duration of the transmission will not be the same in the two senses, since the station A, for example, moves forward to meet the optical perturbation emanating from B, whereas the station B flees before the perturbation emanating from A. The watches adjusted in that way will not mark, therefore, the true time; they will mark what may be called the local time, so that one of them will be slow of the other.[13]“

ThisPoincaré (“–Einstein”) synchronisation was used by telegraphers as soon as the mid-nineteenth century. It would allow to cover the galaxy with synchronized clocks (although local times will differ a bit depending upon the motion of stars, and in particular where in the galactic rotation curve a star sits). Transmitting instantaneous signals in that networks would not affect causality. Ludicrously, Wikipedia asserts that faster than light signals would make “Bertha” rich (!!!). That comes simply from Wikipedia getting thoroughly confused, allowing faster than light signals for some data, and not for other data, thus giving an advantage to some, and not others.

(It comes in at least three types of increasing strength.) Quantum Entanglement, as known today, is within Quantum state to within Quantum state, but we cannot control in which Quantum state the particle will be, to start with, so we cannot use QE for communicating faster than light (because we don’t control what we write, so to speak, as we write with states, so we send gibberish).

This argument is formalized in a “No Faster Than Light Communication theorem”. However, IMHO, the proof contains massive loopholes (the proof assumes that there is no Sub Quantum Reality, whatsoever, nor could there ever be some, ever, and thus that the unlikely QM axioms are forever absolutely true beyond all possible redshifts you could possibly imagine, inter alia). So this is not the final story here. QE enables, surprisingly, the Quantum Radar (something I didn’t see coming). And it is not clear to me that we have absolutely no control on states statistically, thus that we can’t use what Schrödinger, building on the EPR thought experiment, called “Quantum Steering” to communicate at a distance. Quantum Radar and Quantum Steering are now enacted through real devices. They use faster-than-light in their inner machinery.

As the preceding showed, the supposed contradiction of faster-than-light communications with Relativity is just an urban legend. It makes the tribe of physicists more priestly, as they evoke a taboo nobody can understand, for the good reason that it makes no sense, and it is intellectually comfortable, as it simplifies brainwork, taboos always do, but it is a lie. And it is high time this civilization switches to the no more lies theorem, lest it wants to finish roasted, poisoned, flooded, weaponized and demonized.

As Wikipedia itself puts it, weasel-style, to try to insinuate that Einstein brought something very significant to the debate, the eradication of the aether (but the aether came back soon after, and there are now several “reasons” for it; the point being that, as Poincaré suspected, there is a notion of absolute rest, and now we know this for several reasons: CRB, Unruh effect, etc.):

“In 1892 and 1895, Hendrik Lorentz used a mathematical method called “local time” t’ = t – v x/c2 for explaining the negative aether drift experiments.[5] However, Lorentz gave no physical explanation of this effect. This was done by Henri Poincaré who already emphasized in 1898 the conventional nature of simultaneity and who argued that it is convenient to postulate the constancy of the speed of light in all directions. However, this paper does not contain any discussion of Lorentz’s theory or the possible difference in defining simultaneity for observers in different states of motion.[6][7] This was done in 1900, when Poincaré derived local time by assuming that the speed of light is invariant within the aether. Due to the “principle of relative motion”, moving observers within the aether also assume that they are at rest and that the speed of light is constant in all directions (only to first order in v/c). Therefore, if they synchronize their clocks by using light signals, they will only consider the transit time for the signals, but not their motion in respect to the aether. So the moving clocks are not synchronous and do not indicate the “true” time. Poincaré calculated that this synchronization error corresponds to Lorentz’s local time.[8][9] In 1904, Poincaré emphasized the connection between the principle of relativity, “local time”, and light speed invariance; however, the reasoning in that paper was presented in a qualitative and conjectural manner.[10][11]

Albert Einstein used a similar method in 1905 to derive the time transformation for all orders in v/c, i.e., the complete Lorentz transformation. Poincaré obtained the full transformation earlier in 1905 but in the papers of that year he did not mention his synchronization procedure. This derivation was completely based on light speed invariance and the relativity principle, so Einstein noted that for the electrodynamics of moving bodies the aether is superfluous. Thus, the separation into “true” and “local” times of Lorentz and Poincaré vanishes – all times are equally valid and therefore the relativity of length and time is a natural consequence.[12][13][14]“

… Except of course, absolute relativity of length and time is not really true: everywhere in the universe, locally at rest frames can be defined, in several manner (optical, mechanical, gravitational, and even using a variant of the Quantum Field Theory Casimir Effect). All other frames are in trouble, so absolute motion can be detected. The hope of Einstein, in devising General Relativity was to explain inertia, but he ended down with just a modification of the 1800 CE Bullialdus-Newton-Laplace theory… (Newton knew his instantaneous gravitation made no sense, and condemned it severely, so Laplace introduced a gravitation speed, thus the gravitational waves, and Poincaré made them relativistic in 1905… Einstein got the applause…)

Discontinuing The Continuum, Replacing It By Quantum Entanglement Of Granular Substrate:

Is the universe granular? Discontinuous? Is spacetime somehow emergent? I do have an integrated solution to these quandaries, using basic mass-energy physics, and quantum entanglement. (The two master ideas I use here are mine alone, and if I am right, will change physics radically in the fullness of time.)

First let me point out that worrying about this is not just a pet lunacy of mine. Edward Witten is the only physicist to have got a top mathematics prize, and is viewed by many as the world’s top physicist (I have met with him). He gave a very interesting interview to Quanta Magazine: “A Physicist’s Physicist Ponders the Nature of Reality.

Edward Witten reflects on the meaning of dualities in physics and math, emergent space-time, and the pursuit of a complete description of nature.”

Witten: “I tend to assume that space-time and everything in it are in some sense emergent. By the way, you’ll certainly find that that’s what Wheeler expected in his essay [Information, Physics, Quantum, Wheeler’s 1989 essay propounding the idea that the physical universe arises from information, which he dubbed “it from bit.” He should have called it: “It from Qubit”. But the word “Qubit” didn’t exist yet; nor really the concept, as physicists had not realized yet the importance of entanglement and nonlocality in building the universe: they viewed them more as “spooky” oddities on the verge of self-contradiction. ..]

Edward Witten: As you’ll read, he [Wheeler] thought the continuum was wrong in both physics and math. He did not think one’s microscopic description of space-time should use a continuum of any kind — neither a continuum of space nor a continuum of time, nor even a continuum of real numbers. On the space and time, I’m sympathetic to that. On the real numbers, I’ve got to plead ignorance or agnosticism. It is something I wonder about, but I’ve tried to imagine what it could mean to not use the continuum of real numbers, and the one logician I tried discussing it with didn’t help me.”

***

Well, I spent much more time studying logic than Witten, a forlorn, despised and alienating task. (Yet, when one is driven by knowledge, nothing beats an Internet connected cave in the desert, far from the distracting trivialities!) Studying fundamental logic, an exercise mathematicians, let alone physicists, tend to detest, brought me enlightenment. mostly because it shows how relative it is, and how it can take thousands of years to make simple, obvious steps. How to solve this lack of logical imagination affecting the tremendous mathematician cum physicist Witten? Simple. From energy considerations, there is an event horizon to how large an expression can be written. Thus, in particular there is a limit to the size of a number. Basically, a number can’t be larger than the universe.

This also holds for the continuum: just as numbers can’t be arbitrarily large, neither can the digital expression of a given number be arbitrarily long. In other words, irrational numbers don’t exist (I will detail in the future what is wrong with the 24 century old proof, step by step).

As the world consists in sets of entangled quantum states (also known as “qubits”), the number of states can get much larger than the world of numbers. For example a set of 300 entangled up or down spins presents with 2^300 states (much larger than the number of atoms in the observable, 100 billion light years across universe). Such sets (“quantum simulators”) have been basically implemented in the lab.

Digital computers only work with finite expressions. Thus practical, effective logic uses already only finite mathematics, and finite logic. Thus there is no difficulty to use only finite mathematics. Physically, it presents the interest of removing many infinities (although not renormalization!)

Quantum entanglement creates a much richer spacetime than the granular subjacent space. Thus an apparently continuous spacetime is emergent from granular space. Let’s go back to the example above: 300 spins, in a small space, once quantum entangled, give a much richer spacetime quantum space of 2^300 states.

Consider again a set S of 300 particles (a practical case would be 300 atoms with spins up or down). If a set of “particles” are all entangled together I will call that a EQN (Entangled Quantum Network). Now consider an incoming wave W (typically a photonic or gravitational wave; but it could be a phonon, etc.). Classically, if the 300 particles were… classical, W has little probability to interact with S, because it has ONLY 300 “things”, 300 entities, to interact with. Quantum Mechanically, though, it has 2^300 “things”, all the states of the EQN, to interact with. Thus, a much higher probability of interacting. Certainly the wave W is more likely to interact wit2^300 entities than with 300, in the same space! (The classical computations can’t be made from scratch by me, or anybody else; but the classical computation, depending on “transparency” of a film of 300 particles would actually depend upon the Quantum computation nature makes discreetly, yet pervasely!

EQNs make (mathematically at least) an all pervasive “volume” occupying wave. I wrote “volume” with quote-unquote, because some smart asses, very long ago (nearly a century) pointed out that the Quantum Waves are in “PHASE” space, thus are NOT “real” waves. Whatever that means: Quantum volumes/spaces in which Quantum Waves compute can be very complicated, beyond electoral gerrymandering of congressional districts in the USA! In particular, they don’t have to be 3D “volumes”. That doesn’t make them less “real”. To allude to well-established mathematics: a segment is a one dimensional volume. A space filling curve is also a sort of volume, as is a fractal (and has a fractal dimension).

Now quantum entanglement has been demonstrated over thousands of kilometers, and mass (so to speak) quantum entanglement has been demonstrated over 500 nanometers (5,000 times the size of an atom). One has to understand that solids are held by quantum entanglement. So there is plenty enough entanglement to generate spaces of apparently continuous possibilities and even consciousness… from a fundamentally granular space.

Entanglement, or how to get continuum from discontinuum. (To sound like Wheeler.)

The preceding seems pretty obvious to me. Once those truths get around, everybody will say:’But of course, that’s so obvious! Didn’t Witten say that first?’

No, he didn’t.

You read it here first.

Granular space giving rise to practically continuous spacetime is an idea where deep philosophy proved vastly superior to the shortsightedness of vulgar mathematics.

Through Wave Collapse and the ensuing Entanglements it sometimes brings, QUANTUM PHYSICS CREATES A CAUSAL STRUCTURE, THROUGHOUT THE UNIVERSE, THUS, AN ARROW OF TIME.

Actually it’s more than a simple causal structure: it is an existential structure, as localization creates materialization, in the (Sub-)Quantum Theory I advocate. (It’s a theory where there are no dead-and-alive cats, but particles in flight are not particles… Contrarily to what Einstein thought, but more along the lines of Niels Bohr, horror of horrors…) It also means that time, at the smallest scale, is a nonlocal entanglement. This is not a weird new age poetry, but pretty much what the raw formalism of Quantum Physics say. I throw the challenge to any physicist to contradict this in any way. It’s completely obvious on the face of it.

You read it here first, as they say (although I may have said it before). Is time absolute? How could time be absolute? Where does the Arrow Of Time (Eddington) come from? Is there something else which grows with time?

The old answer is entropy, traditionally denoted by S.

Boltzmann’s equation S = k log P says that entropy augments during the evolution of a system. P indicates the number of states accessible by the system. Entropy was a construction from later Nineteenth Century physics, a successful attempt to understand the basic laws of thermodynamics (mostly due to Carnot).

A big problem for classical thermodynamics: what’s a state? That’s not clear.

However Quantum Physics define states, very precisely. However, very specifically: a situation, defined in space-time, what Bohr and Al. called an “experiment” (rightly so!) defines a number of possible outcomes: the latter become the “states”, a basis for the Hilbert Space the “experiment” defines.

Classical statistical mechanics does not enjoy such precisely defined states. So why not to use the states of Quantum Physics? Some could object that Quantum “experiments” are set-up by people. However Quantum Interactions happen all the time, independently of people. As in the Quantum experiments set-up by people, those Quantum Interactions grow something: Quantum Entanglement. ( Self-described “Quantum Mechanic” Seth Lloyd from MIT has also mentioned that entanglement and the arrow of time could be related.)

Quantum Entanglement has a direction: from where singularization (= localization = the collapse of the Quantum wave packet) happened first, to the distant place it creates the geometry of (yes, entanglement creates geometry, that’s why it’s so baffling to specialists!)

Quantum Physics, Or, More Precisely, What I call QUANTUM INTERACTIONS are irreversible processes. Hence the Arrow Of Time

So we have two things which grow, and can’t be reversed: Time and Wave Collapse/Quantum Entanglement. I propose to identify them. (After all, Maxwell proposed to identify electromagnetic waves and light, just because they are both waves and went at the same speed; it turned out to be a magnificent insight.)

Quantum Wave function collapse is time irreversible (actually, the entire Quantum Wave deployment is time irreversible, because it depends only upon the geometry it’s deployed in). The mechanism of wave function collapse is philosophically a matter of often obscure interpretations, and arguably the greatest problem in physics and philosophy.

By the way, it is the collapse of the Quantum Wave which “creates” the Quantum Entanglement At least that’s how the mathematics, the description of the theory has it! The picture it creates in one’s mind (first the wave, then the collapse, then the entanglement) makes sense. Actually I am arguing that this is how sense makes sense!

Quantum Entanglement is a proven experimental fact. All physicists have to agree with that. Thus the Quantum Wave has to be real, as it is the cause of the Quantum Entanglement! (I am pointing out here that those, and that’s now nearly all of them, who believe in Entanglement are incoherent if they don’t believe in the wave too!).

Even Einstein publicly frowned on the concept of “spacetime”, which identifies space and time; “spacetime” was proposed by Minkowski, Einstein’s own professor at the EHT… They may not have been friends, as Minkowski compared Einstein to a “lazy dog”; Einstein, of course, respected Poincaré so much, that he grabbed the entire theory of Relativity from him, including its name…

Quantum Physics does not outright treat time as equivalent to space, quite the opposite (although Quantum Field theorists have tried to, and do treat space and “imaginary time” as the same!). In fundamental Quantum Physics, time is a one parameter group of transformation, not really a dimension.

When a glass falls and shatters, Classical Mechanics is at a loss:’Why can’t it reassemble itself, with as little work?” Classical Thermodynamics mumbles:’Because Entropy augments’. (That may be a tenable position, but one will have to count the states of the glass in a Quantum way. Even then, the full energy computation will reveal a lack of symmetry.)

I say, simply:’A glass which has shattered can’t be reassembled, because Quantum Interactions, and ensuing entanglements happen.’ The resulting topology of cause and effect is more complicated than what one started with, and can’t be reversed. Quantum Interactions and ensuing effects at a distance they provide with, create a partial, nonlocal, ordering of the universe. Time. (Once a set has been physically defined, it has been thoroughly interacted with, Quantum Mechanically, and then it becomes a “well ordering”!)

So what’s time? The causal structure of the universe as determined by irreversible, causal Quantum Wave collapse and Quantum Entanglement.

Long story short: My own theory of Dark Matter predicts that Dark Matter is EMERGENT. That could be viewed as a huge flaw, easy to disprove, sending me back to a burrow somewhere to pursue my humble subterranean existence of sorts. HOWEVER, big surprise: DARK MATTER EMERGENCE seems to be exactly what was just observed in 2017, at the European Southern Observatory (ESO)!

***

Anomalies in the behavior of gravitation at a galactic scale, has become the greatest crisis in physics. Ever:

Zwicky computed that the observed gravitational pull did not correspond to the visible matter, by an ORDER OF MAGNITUDE, and thus Zwicky assumed that there was plenty of matter that could not be seen. (At the time, physicists scoffed, and went to stuff more interesting to the military, thus, better esteemed and more propitious to glorious splurging and handshakes from political leaders!)

If spiral galaxies were only made up of the matter that we can see, stars at the outer edge should orbit the centre slower than those closer to the center.. But Zwicky noticed that this was not the case: all the stars in the Andromeda galaxy move at similar speeds, regardless of their distance from the galactic center. (For nationalistic reasons Americans love to attribute DM’s discovery to American astronomers Vera Rubin and Kent Ford .in the 1970s. However great Vera Rubin is, that’s despicable: they worked 40 years after Zwicky.)

Many studies since the 1930s provided evidence for Dark Matter. Such matter doesn’t interact with light, that’s why it is dark. Thus, one can only observe the effects of Dark Matter via its gravitational effects.

Nobel Prizes Were Only Given To the 5% So Far. The 5% Are All What Today’s Official Physics Is About. This Is One Of The Reasons Why I Am Thinking Outside Of Their 5% Box…

***

How does one compute the mass of a galaxy?

One just look at how many stars it has. (In the Solar System, the sun is a thousand times more massive than all the planets combined; studies on how much stars are moved by the planets around them confirm that most of the mass is in the stars.) And that shows up as the overall light emitted by a galaxy. Summing up the observed light sums up the mass. Or, at least that was the long-standing idea. (More recently, the pull gravitation exerts on light has been used to detect Dark Matter, and it has been used on a… massive scale!)

At the scale of galaxies, or galactic clusters, the motions of objects is indicating at least ten times the gravitational force that should be there, according to gravitation theory, considering the mass we see (that is the mass of all the stars we see).

Problem: that would mean that he so-called “Standard Model” of physics has no explanation for most of the mass in the galactic clusters.

Reality check: the celebrities of physics are very arrogant, and think they know exactly what the universe had for breakfast, 13.8 billion years ago, and how big it was (never mind that their logic is ridiculously flawed). Up to a few years ago, many were in denial that they were missing most of the mass-energy in the universe with their Standard Model theory.

However, here they are now, having to admit they missed 95.1&% of the mass-energy in the universe (according to their own latest estimates)!

A low logical cost solution to the riddle of the apparently missing mass, was to decree that all physicists who have studied gravitation since Bullialdus, nearly four centuries ago, got it wrong, and that gravitation is not, after all, an inverse square of the distance law. A problem is that French astronomer Bullaldius’ very elementary reasoning seems still to have kept some validity today. Remember that, in the Quantum Field Theory setting, forces are supposedly due to (virtual) particle exchanges? Well, that was the basic picture Bullialdus had in mind! (Thus those who want to modify so-called “Newtonian Dynamics” wreck the basic particle exchange model!)

***

Bullialdus’ Inverse Distance Squared Law, Basic to Newton-Eintein:

Ismael Boulliau (aka Bullialdus) a famous astronomer, member of the English Royal Society, proposed the inverse square law for gravity, a generation before Newton. (Bullialdus crater on the Moon, named for Boulliau, would have water, by the way.) Boulliau reasoned that the force would come from particles emitted by the sun, just like light. Here is Bullialdus voice:

“As for the power by which the Sun seizes or holds the planets, and which, being corporeal, functions in the manner of hands, it is emitted in straight lines throughout the whole extent of the world… seeing that it is corporeal, it becomes weaker and attenuated at a greater distance or interval, and the ratio of its decrease in strength is the same as in the case of light, namely, the duplicate proportion, but inversely, of the distances that is, 1/d².”

Why still true today? The carrier of force are particles.If they go to infinite distance (as electromagnetism and gravitation do), then the density of filed carriers (photons, gravitons) will go down, as Bullialdus said, for the reason he gave.

Bullaldius’ observation is the basis of Newton’s gravitation theory, which is itself the first order approximation of Einstein’s theory of gravitation. (Einstein’s gravitaion is a tweak on Newton’s theory; what Einstein did is actually to re-activate Buridan’s inertial theory with advanced mathematics invented by others (Riemann, Ricci, Hilbert, Levi-Civitta)

There is a basic problem here: although Einstein’s theory is a small tweak on Newton’s, MONDs are not. Correcting a theory by a factor of ten, a hundred, or a thousand is no tweak. Moreover:

The ESO (European Southern Observatory) observation, illustrated above by ESO itself, seems to condemn BOTH of the two known, “official”classes of solutions for the gravitation problem: LCDM Dark Matter and Mond. The only theory left standing is my own Sub Quantic Dark Matter theory, which is fully emergent.

***

2017 ESO Discovery: Slowly Spinning Old Galaxies:Natascha Förster Schreiber at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany and her colleagues have used the European Very Large Telescope in Chile to make the most detailed observations so far of the movement of six giant galactic discs, 10 billion years ago.

They found that, unlike in (quasi-)contemporary galaxies, the stars at the edges of these galaxies long ago, far away, move more slowly than those closer in.

“This tells us that at early stages of galaxy formation, the relative distribution of the normal matter and the dark matter was significantly different from what it is today,” says Förster Schreiber. (Well, maybe. MY interpretation would be very different! No DM!)

In order to check their unexpected results, the researchers used a “stack” of 101 images of other early galaxies to find an average picture of their rotations. The stacked galaxies matched the rotations of the more rigorously studied ones. “We’re not just looking at six weirdo galaxies – this could be more common,” says Förster Schreiber. “For me, that was the wow moment.”

***

MOdified Newtonian Dynamics (MONDs) Don’t Work:

About 10 billion years ago, there was a peak formation period of galaxies. By looking 10 billion light years away, one can see what was going on then, and have plenty of galaxies to look at. Where was the Dark Matter there? Was there Dark Matter then? One can answer these questions by just looking, because Dark Matter shows up in the way galaxies rotate, or orbit (in galactic cluster).

The result is both completely unexpected and spectacular! I am thrilled by it, because what is observed to happen is exactly the main prediction of MY theory of Dark Matter!

What is found is that, ten billion years ago, the largest star-forming galaxies were dominated by normal matter, not by the dark matter that’s so influential in galaxies today. (I reckon that this result was already indicated by the existence of galaxies which are mostly Dark Matter… at least in my sort of cosmology which differs massively from the standard Lambda Cold Dark Matter, LCDM model.)

MOND theories, relativistic or not, say that gravity is ten times stronger at, say, 30,000 light years away from a mass. If that’s the true law of gravitation in the last few hundreds of millions of years (as observed in presently surrounding galaxies), it should have been the case ten billion years ago. But that’s not what’s observed. So MOND theories can’t be true

On the face of it, the discovery about those ten billion year old galaxies say that the galactic disks then did not contain Dark Matter. That seems to me that it shoots down both MOND theories and the LCDM model (that’s the fancy name for the conventional Big Bang, latest version).

However, conventional scientists, and, in particular, cosmologists, are good at pirouettes, that’s why they are professionals. There is still a (twisted) logical escape for LCDM model. The differences in early galaxies’ rotations demonstrates that there is very little Dark Matter in towards the middle of their disks, to start with, reason the Cold Dark Matter specialists. Instead, those ancient galaxies’ disks are almost entirely made up of the matter we see as stars and gas. The further away (and thus earlier in cosmic history) the galaxies were, the less dark matter their disks contained.

The specialists suggest that the turbulent gas in early galaxies condensed into the flat, rotating disk shapes we see today more quickly than Dark Matter, which remained in a diffuse “halo”, which would progressively fall in… but had not started to falling enough, ten billion years ago. (That’s weird, because I thought LCDM mixed normal matter and dark matter, right from the start. In any case, I am not going to make their increasingly fishy case for them!).

Dark Matter gathers – but it takes time. This is exactly what my theory of Dark Matter predicts. In my own theory, Dark Matter is the result, the debris, of Quantum Interactions (entanglement resolutions, singularization) at very large distances. This debris gathering takes time.

My Dark Matter theory predicts that Dark Matter is an Emergent phenomenon. No other theory does that. Studies of more than 100 old giant galaxies support my theory, why making the situation (very) difficult for the conventional Dark Matter theory (“LCDM”) and impossible for the MOND theories.

This progressive build-up of Dark Matter is NOT predicted by the other two Dark Matter theories. The standard (LCDM) cosmological Dark Matter model does NOT predict a slow gathering of Dark Matter. Nor does the MOdified Newtonian Dynamics theories (MOND, relativistic or not) predict a slow apparition of Dark Matter.m the center and most of the visible matter.

It has been taken for granted by the Dark Matter advocates that Dark Matter, a sort of non-standard standard matter, was in the universe from its legendary start, the Big Boom, aka, Big Bang,

“This is an important step in trying to figure out how galaxies like the Milky Way and larger galaxies must have assembled,” says Mark Swinbank at Durham University. “Having a constraint on how early the gas and stars must have formed the discs and how well-mixed they were with dark matter is important to informing their evolution.”

Right. Or maybe, as I speculate, for plenty of excellent reasons coming from logically far away, this is an indication that not Gravitation Theory, but Quantum Theory, is not correct. Oh, the Standard Model, too, is not correct. But we all already knew this…

Conclusion: If the ESO observation that Dark Matter was not present in large galactic disks, ten billion years ago, is correct, I cannot imagine how MOdified Newtonian Dynamics theories could survive. And I find highly implausible that LCDM would. All what is left standing, is my own theory, the apparent main flaw of which, is now turned into a spectacular prediction! DARK MATTER Appears SLOWLY as predicted by Patrice Ayme’s SUB-QUANTIC Model. (Wow!)

How to find really new knowledge? How do you find really new science? Not by knowing the result: this is what we don’t have yet. Any really new science will not be deduced from pre-existing science. Any really new knowledge will come out of the blue. Poetical logic will help before linear logic does.

The case of Dark Matter is telling: this increasingly irritating elephant in the bathroom has been in evidence for 80 years, lumbering about. As the encumbering beast did not fit existing science, it was long religiously ignored by the faithful, as a subject not worthy of serious inquiry by very serious physicists. Now Dark Matter, five times more massive than Standard Model matter, is clearly sitting heavily outside of the Standard Model, threatening to crush it into irrelevance. Dark matter obscures the lofty pretense of known physics to explain everything (remember the grandly named TOE, the so-called “Theory Of Everything“? That was a fraud, snake oil, because main stream physics celebrities crowed about TOE, while knowing perfectly well that Dark Matter dwarfed standard matter, and was completely outside of the Standard Model).

Physicists are presently looking for Dark Matter, knowing what they know, namely that nature has offered them a vast zoo of particles, many of them without rhyme or reason (some have rhyme, a symmetry, a mathematical group such as SU3 acting upon them; symmetries revealed new particles, sometimes).

Bullet Cluster, 100 Million Years Old. Two Galaxies Colliding. The Dark Matter, In Blue, Is Physically Separated From the Hot, Standard Matter Gas, in Red.

[This sort of pictures is most of what we presently have to guess what Dark Matter could be; the physical separation of DM and SM is most telling to me: it seems to indicate that SM and DM do not respond to the same forces, something that my Quantum theory predicts; it’s known that Dark Matter causes gravitational lensing, as one would expect, as it was first found by its gravitational effects, in the 1930s…]

However, remember: a truly completely new piece of science cannot be deduced from pre-existing paradigm. Thus, if Dark Matter was really about finding a new particle type, it would be interesting, but not as interesting as it would be, if it were not, after all, a new particle type, but from a completely new law in physics.

This is the quandary about finding truly completely new science. It can never be deduced from ruling paradigms, and may actually overthrow them. What should then be the method to use? Can Descartes and Sherlock Holmes help? The paradigm presented by Quantum Physics helps. The Quantum looks everywhere in space to find solutions: this is where its (“weird”) nonlocality comes in. Nonlocality is crucial for interference patterns and for finding lowest energy solutions, as in the chlorophyll molecule. This suggests that our minds should go nonlocal too, and we should look outside of a more extensive particle zoo to find what Dark Matter is.

In general, searching for new science should be by looking everywhere, not hesitating to possibly contradict what is more traditional than well established.

An obvious possibility is, precisely, that Quantum Physics is itself incomplete, and generating Dark Matter in places where said incompleteness would be most blatant. More precisely, Quantum processes, stretched over cosmic distances, instead of being perfectly efficient and nonlocal over gigantically cosmic locales, could leave a Quantum mass-energy residue, precisely in the places where extravagant cosmic stretching of Quanta occurs (before “collapse”, aka “decoherence”).

The more one does find a conventional explanation (namely a new type of particle) for Dark Matter, the more likely my style of explanation is likely. How could one demonstrate it? Not by looking for new particles, but by conducting new and more refined experiments in the foundations of Quantum Physics.

If this guess is correct, whatever is found askew in the axioms of present Quantum Physics could actually help future Quantum Computer technology (because the latter works with Quantum foundations directly, whereas conventional high energy physics tend to eschew the wave aspects, due to the high frequencies involved).

Going on a tangent is what happens when the central, attractive force, is let go. A direct effect of freedom. Free thinking is tangential. We have to learn to produce tangential thinking.

René Descartes tried to doubt the truth of all his beliefs to determine which beliefs he could be certain were true. However, at the end of “The Meditations” he hastily conclude that we can distinguish between dream and reality. It is not that simple. The logic found in dreams is all too similar to the logic used by full-grown individuals in society.

Proof? Back to Quantum Physics. On the face of it, the axioms of Quantum Physics have a dream like quality (there is no “here”, nor “there”, “now” is everywhere, and, mysteriously, the experiment is Quantum, whereas the “apparatus” is “classical”). Still, most physicists, after insinuating they have figured out the universe, eschew the subject carefully. The specialists of Foundations are thoroughly confused: see Sean Carroll, http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2013/01/17/the-most-embarrassing-graph-in-modern-physics/

However unbelievable Quantum Physics, however dream-like it is, physicists believe in it, and don’t question it anymore than cardinals would Jesus. Actually, it’s this dream-like nature which, shared by all, defines the community of physicists. Cartesian doubt, pushed further than Descartes did, will question not just the facts, the allegations, but the logic itself. And even the mood behind it.

Certainly, in the case of Dark Matter, some of the questions civilization has to ask should be:

How sure are we of the Foundations of Quantum Physics? (Answer: very sure, all too sure!)

Could not it be that Dark Matter is a cosmic size experiment in the Foundations of Quantum Physics?

Physics, properly done, does not just question the nature of nature. Physics, properly done, questions the nature of how we find out the nature of anything. Physics, properly done, even questions the nature of why we feel the way we do. And the way we did. About anything, even poetry. In the end, indeed, even the toughest logic is a form of poetry, hanging out there, justified by its own beauty, and nothing else. Don’t underestimate moods: they call what beauty is.

What is the greatest scientific discovery of the Twentieth Century? Not Jules Henri Poincaré’s Theory of Relativity and his famous equation: E = mcc. Although a spectacular theory, since Poincaré’s made time local, in order to keep the speed of light constant, it stemmed from Galileo’s Principle of Relativity, extended to Electromagnetism. To save electromagnetism globally, Jules Henri Poincaré made time and length local.

So was the discovery of the Quantum by Planck the greatest discovery? To explain two mysteries of academic physics, Planck posited that energy was emitted in lumps. Philosophically, though, the idea was just to extent to energy the basic philosophical principle of atomism, which was two thousand years old. Energy itself was discovered by Émilie Du Châtelet in the 1730s.

Quantum Entanglement Is NOT AT ALL Classically Predictable

Just as matter went in lumps (strict atomism), so did energy. In light of Poincaré’s E = mc2, matter and energy are the same, so this is not surprising (by a strange coincidence (?) Poincaré demonstrated, and published E = mc2, a few month of the same year, 1900, as Max Planck did E = hf; Einstein used both formulas in 1905).

The greatest scientific discovery of Twentieth Century was Entanglement… which is roughly the same as Non-Locality. Non-Locality would have astounded Newton: he was explicitly very much against it, and viewed it, correctly, as the greatest flaw of his theory. My essay “Non-Locality” entangles Newton, Émilie Du Châtelet, and the Quantum, because therefrom the ideas first sprung.

***

Bell Inequality Is Obvious:

The head of the Theoretical division of CERN, John Bell, discovered an inequality which is trivial and apparently so basic, so incredibly obvious, that it reflects the most basic common sense that it should always be true. Ian Miller (PhD, Physical Chemistry) provided a very nice perspective on all this. Here it is, cut and pasted (with his agreement):

The role of mathematics in physics is interesting. Originally, mathematical relationships were used to summarise a myriad of observations, thus from Newtonian gravity and mechanics, it is possible to know where the moon will be in the sky at any time. But somewhere around the beginning of the twentieth century, an odd thing happened: the mathematics of General Relativity became so complicated that many, if not most physicists could not use it. Then came the state vector formalism for quantum mechanics, a procedure that strictly speaking allowed people to come up with an answer without really understanding why. Then, as the twentieth century proceeded, something further developed: a belief that mathematics was the basis of nature. Theory started with equations, not observations. An equation, of course, is a statement, thus A equals B can be written with an equal sign instead of words. Now we have string theory, where a number of physicists have been working for decades without coming up with anything that can be tested. Nevertheless, most physicists would agree that if observation falsifies a mathematical relationship, then something has gone wrong with the mathematics, and the problem is usually a false premise. With Bell’s Inequalities, however, it seems logic goes out the window.

Bell’s inequalities are applicable only when the following premises are satisfied:

Premise 1: One can devise a test that will give one of two discrete results. For simplicity we label these (+) and (-).

Premise 2: We can carry out such a test under three different sets of conditions, which we label A, B and C. When we do this, the results between tests have to be comparable, and the simplest way of doing this is to represent the probability of a positive result at A as A(+). The reason for this is that if we did 10 tests at A, 10 at B, and 500 at C, we cannot properly compare the results simply by totalling results.

Premise 1 is reasonably easily met. John Bell used as an example, washing socks. The socks would either pass a test (e.g. they are clean) or fail, (i.e. they need rewashing). In quantum mechanics there are good examples of suitable candidates, e.g. a spin can be either clockwise or counterclockwise, but not both. Further, all particles must have the same spin, and as long as they are the same particle, this is imposed by quantum mechanics. Thus an electron has a spin of either +1/2 or -1/2.

Premises 1 and 2 can be combined. By working with probabilities, we can say that each particle must register once, one way or the other (or each sock is tested once), which gives us

A(+) + A(-) = 1; B(+) + B(-) = 1; C(+) + C(-) = 1

i.e. the probability of one particle tested once and giving one of the two results is 1. At this point we neglect experimental error, such as a particle failing to register.

Now, let us do a little algebra/set theory by combining probabilities from more than one determination. By combining, we might take two pieces of apparatus, and with one determine the (+) result at condition A, and the negative one at (B) If so, we take the product of these, because probabilities are multiplicative. If so, we can write

A(+) B(-) = A(+) B(-) [C(+) + C(-)]

because the bracketed term [C(+) + C(-)] equals 1, the sum of the probabilities of results that occurred under conditions C.

Since the bracketed term [(B(+) + B(-)] equals 1 and the last two terms are positive numbers, or at least zero, we have

A(+) B(-) + B(+)C(-) ≧ A(+)C(-)

This is the simplest form of a Bell inequality. In Bell’s sock-washing example, he showed how socks washed at three different temperatures had to comply.

An important point is that provided the samples in the tests must give only one result from only two possible results, and provided the tests are applied under three sets of conditions, the mathematics say the results must comply with the inequality. Further, only premise 1 relates to the physics of the samples tested; the second is merely a requirement that the tests are done competently. The problem is, modern physicists say entangled particles violate the inequality. How can this be?

Non-compliance by entangled particles is usually considered a consequence of the entanglement being non-local, but that makes no sense because in the above derivation, locality is not mentioned. All that is required is that premise 1 holds, i.e. measuring the spin of one particle, say, means the other is known without measurement. So, the entangled particles have properties that fulfil premise 1. Thus violation of the inequality means either one of the premises is false, or the associative law of sets, used in the derivation, is false, which would mean all mathematics are invalid.

So my challenge is to produce a mathematical relationship that shows how these violations could conceivably occur? You must come up with a mathematical relationship or a logic statement that falsifies the above inequality, and it must include a term that specifies when the inequality is violated. So, any takers? My answer in my next Monday post.

[Ian Miller.]

***

The treatment above shows how ludicrous it should be that reality violate that inequality… BUT IT DOES! This is something which nobody had seen coming. No philosopher ever imagined something as weird. I gave an immediate answer to Ian:

‘Locality is going to come in the following way: A is going to be in the Milky Way, B and C, on Andromeda. A(+) B(-) is going to be 1/2 square [cos(b-a)]. Therefrom the contradiction. There is more to be said. But first of all, I will re-blog your essay, as it makes the situation very clear.’

Frank Wilczek, a physics Nobel laureate, wrote a first soporific, and then baffling article in Quanta magazine: “Entanglement Made Simple”. Yes, all too simple: it sweeps the difficulties under the rug. After a thorough description of classical entanglement, we are swiftly told at the end, that classical entanglement supports the many World Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. However, classical entanglement (from various conservation laws) has been known since the seventeenth century.

Skeptical founders of Quantum physics (such as Einstein, De Broglie, Schrodinger, Bohm, Bell) knew classical entanglement very well. David Bohm found the Bohm-Aharanov effect, which demonstrated the importance of (nonlocal) potential, John Bell found his inequality which demonstrated, with the help of experiments (Alain Aspect, etc.) that Quantum physics is nonlocal.

Differently From Classical Entanglement, Which Acts As One, Quantum Entanglement Acts At A Distance: It Interferes With Measurement, At A Distance

The point about the cats is that everybody, even maniacs, ought to know that cats are either dead, or alive. Quantum mechanics make the point they can compute things about cats, from their point of view. OK.

Quantum mechanics, in their busy shops, compute with dead and live cats as possible outcomes. No problem. But then does that mean there is a universe, a “world“, with a dead cat, happening, and then one with a live cat, also happening simultaneously?

Any serious philosopher, somebody endowed with common sense, the nemesis of a Quantum mechanic, will say no: in a philosopher’s opinion, a cat is either dead, or alive. To be, or not to be. Not to be, and not to be.

A Quantum mechanic can compute with dead and live cats, but that does not mean she creates worlds, by simply rearranging her computation, this way, or that. Her various dead and live cats arrangements just mean she has partial knowledge of what she computes with, and that Quantum measurements, even from an excellent mechanic, are just partial, mechanic-dependent measurements.

For example, if one measures spin, one needs to orient a machine (a Stern Gerlach device). That’s just a magnetic field going one way, like a big arrow, a big direction. Thus one measures spin in one direction, not another.

What’s more surprising is that, later on, thanks to a nonlocal entanglement, one may be able to determine that, at this point in time, the particle had a spin that could be measured, from far away, in another direction. So far, so good: this is like classical mechanics.

However, whether or not that measurement at a distance has occurred, roughly simultaneously, and way out of the causality light cone, EFFECTS the first measurement.

And this is what the problem with Quantum Entanglement is. Quantum Entanglement implies that wilful action somewhere disturbs a measurement beyond the reach of the five known forces. It brings all sorts of questions of a philosophical nature, and make them into burning physical subjects. For example, does the experimenter at a distance have real free will?

Calling the world otherworldly, or many worldly, does not really help to understand what is going on. Einstein’s “Spooky Interaction At A Distance” seems a more faithful, honest rendition of reality than supposing that each and any Quantum mechanic in her shop, creates worlds, willy-nilly, each time it strikes her fancy to press a button.

What Mr. Wilczek did is what manyworldists and multiversists always do: they jump into their derangement (cats alive AND dead) after saying there is no problem. Details are never revealed.

Here is, in extenso, the fully confusing and unsupported conclusion of Mr. Wilczek:

“Everyday language is ill suited to describe quantum complementarity, in part because everyday experience does not encounter it. Practical cats interact with surrounding air molecules, among other things, in very different ways depending on whether they are alive or dead, so in practice the measurement gets made automatically, and the cat gets on with its life (or death). But entangled histories describe q-ons that are, in a real sense, Schrödinger kittens. Their full description requires, at intermediate times, that we take both of two contradictory property-trajectories into account.

The controlled experimental realization of entangled histories is delicate because it requires we gather partial information about our q-on. Conventional quantum measurements generally gather complete information at one time — for example, they determine a definite shape, or a definite color — rather than partial information spanning several times. But it can be done — indeed, without great technical difficulty. In this way we can give definite mathematical and experimental meaning to the proliferation of “many worlds” in quantum theory, and demonstrate its substantiality.”

Sounds impressive, but the reasons are either well-known or then those reasons use a sleight of hand.

Explicitly: “take both of two contradictory property-trajectories into account”: just read Feynman QED, first chapter. Feynman invented the ‘sum over histories’, and Wilczek is his parrot; but Feynman did not become crazy from his ‘sum over history’: Richard smirked when his picturesque evocation was taken literally, decades later…

And now the sleight of hand: …”rather than [gather] partial information spanning several times. But it can be done — indeed, without great technical difficulty.” This nothing new: it is the essence of the double slit discovered by that Medical Doctor and polymath, Young, around 1800 CE: when one runs lots of ‘particles’ through it, one sees the (wave) patterns. This is what Wilczek means by “partial information“. Guess what? We knew that already.

Believing that one can be, while not to be, putting that at the foundation of physics, is a new low in thinking. And it impacts the general mood, making it more favorable towards unreason.

If anything can be, without being, if anything not happening here, is happening somewhere else, then is not anything permitted? Dostoyevsky had a Russian aristocrat suggests that, if god did not exist anything was permitted. And, come to think of it, the argument was at the core of Christianism. Or more, exactly, of the Christian reign of terror which started in the period 363 CE-381 CE, from the reigns of emperor Jovian to the reign of emperor Theodosius. To prevent anything to be permitted, a god had to enforce the law.

What we have now is way worse: the new nihilists (Wilczek and his fellow manyworldists) do not just say that everything is permitted. They say: it does not matter if everything is permitted, or not. It is happening, anyway. Somewhere.

Thus Many-Worlds physics endangers, not just the foundations of reason, but the very justification for morality. That is that what is undesirable should be avoided. Even the Nazis agreed with that principle. Many-Worlds physics says it does not matter, because it is happening, anyway. Somewhere, out there.

So what is going on, here, at the level of moods? Well, professor Wilczek teaches at Harvard. Harvard professors advised president Yeltsin of Russia, to set up a plutocracy. It ruined Russia. Same professors made a fortune from it, while others were advising president Clinton to do the same, and meanwhile Prime Minister Balladur in France was mightily impressed, and followed this new enlightenment by the Dark Side, as did British leaders, and many others. All these societies were ruined in turn. Harvard was the principal spirit behind the rise of plutocracy, and the engine propelling that rise, was the principle that morality did not matter. because, because, well, Many-Worlds!

How does one go from the foundations of physics, to the foundations of plutocracy? Faculty members in the richest, most powerful universities meet in mutual admiration societies known as “faculty clubs” and lots of other I scratch-your-back, you scratch-my-back social occasion they spend much of their time indulging in. So they influence each other, at the very least in the atmospheres of moods they create, and then breathe together.

Remember? It is not that everything is permitted: it’s happening anyway, so we may as well profit from it first. Many-Worlds physics feeds a mood favorable to many plutocrats, and that’s all there is to it. (But that, of course, is a lot, all too much.)

More exactly, do we know, can we know, enough physics for (full) quantum computing?

I have long suggested that the answer to this question was negative, and smirked at physicists sitting billions of universes on a pinhead, as if they had nothing better to do, the children they are. (Just as their Christian predecessors in the Middle Ages, their motives are not pure.)

Now an article in the American Mathematical Society Journal of May 2016 repeats (some) of the arguments I had in mind: The Quantum Computer Puzzle. Here are some of the arguments. One often hears that Quantum Computers are a done deal. Here is the explanation from Justin Trudeau, Canada’s Prime Minister, which reflects perfectly the official scientific conventional wisdom on the subject: https://youtu.be/rRmv4uD2RQ4

(One wishes all our great leaders would be as knowledgeable… And I am not joking as I write this! Trudeau did engineering and ecological studies.)

… Supposing, Of Course, That One Can Isolate And Manipulate Qubits As One Does Normal Bits…

Before some object that physicists are better qualified than mathematicians to talk about the Quantum, let me point towards someone who is perhaps the most qualified experimentalist in the world on the foundations of Quantum Physics. Serge Haroche is a French physicist who got the Nobel Prize for figuring out how to count photons without seeing them. It’s the most delicate Quantum Non-Demolition (QND) method I have heard of. It involved making the world’s most perfect mirrors. The punch line? Serge Haroche does not believe Quantum Computers are feasible. However Haroche does not suggest how he got there. The article in the AMS does make plenty of suggestions to that effect.

Let me hasten to add some form of Quantum Computing (or Quantum Simulation) called “annealing” is obviously feasible. D Wave, a Canadian company is selling such devices. In my view, Quantum Annealing is just the two slit experiment written large. Thus the counter-argument can be made that conventional computers can simulate annealing (and that has been the argument against D Wave’s machines).

Full Quantum Computing (also called “Quantum Supremacy”) would be something completely different. Gil Kalai, a famous mathematician, and a specialist of Quantum Computing, is skeptical:

“Quantum computers are hypothetical devices, based on quantum physics, which would enable us to perform certain computations hundreds of orders of magnitude faster than digital computers. This feature is coined “quantum supremacy”, and one aspect or another of such quantum computational supremacy might be seen by experiments in the near future: by implementing quantum error-correction or by systems of noninteracting bosons or by exotic new phases of matter called anyons or by quantum annealing, or in various other ways…

A main reason for concern regarding the feasibility of quantum computers is that quantum systems are inherently noisy. We will describe an optimistic hypothesis regarding quantum noise that will allow quantum computing and a pessimistic hypothesis that won’t.”

Gil Katai rolls out a couple of theorems which suggest that Quantum Computing is very sensitive to noise (those are similar to finding out which slit a photon went through). Moreover, he uses a philosophical argument against Quantum Computing:

“It is often claimed that quantum computers can perform certain computations that even a classical computer of the size of the entire universe cannot perform! Indeed it is useful to examine not only things that were previously impossible and that are now made possible by a new technology but also the improvement in terms of orders of magnitude for tasks that could have been achieved by the old technology.

Quantum computers represent enormous, unprecedented order-of-magnitude improvement of controlled physical phenomena as well as of algorithms. Nuclear weapons represent an improvement of 6–7 orders of magnitude over conventional ordnance: the first atomic bomb was a million times stronger than the most powerful (single) conventional bomb at the time. The telegraph could deliver a transatlantic message in a few seconds compared to the previous three-month period. This represents an (immense) improvement of 4–5 orders of magnitude. Memory and speed of computers were improved by 10–12 orders of magnitude over several decades. Breakthrough algorithms at the time of their discovery also represented practical improvements of no more than a few orders of magnitude. Yet implementing Boson Sampling with a hundred bosons represents more than a hundred orders of magnitude improvement compared to digital computers.”

In other words, it unrealistic to expect such a, well, quantum jump…

“Boson Sampling” is a hypothetical, and simplest way, proposed to implement a Quantum Computer. (It is neither known if it could be made nor if it would be good enough for Quantum Computing[ yet it’s intensely studied nevertheless.)

***

Quantum Physics Is The Non-Local Engine Of Space, and Time Itself:

Here is Gil Kalai again:

“Locality, Space and Time

The decision between the optimistic and pessimistic hypotheses is, to a large extent, a question about modeling locality in quantum physics. Modeling natural quantum evolutions by quantum computers represents the important physical principle of “locality”: quantum interactions are limited to a few particles. The quantum circuit model enforces local rules on quantum evolutions and still allows the creation of very nonlocal quantum states.

This remains true for noisy quantum circuits under the optimistic hypothesis. The pessimistic hypothesis suggests that quantum supremacy is an artifact of incorrect modeling of locality. We expect modeling based on the pessimistic hypothesis, which relates the laws of the “noise” to the laws of the “signal”, to imply a strong form of locality for both. We can even propose that spacetime itself emerges from the absence of quantum fault tolerance. It is a familiar idea that since (noiseless) quantum systems are time reversible, time emerges from quantum noise (decoherence). However, also in the presence of noise, with quantum fault tolerance, every quantum evolution that can experimentally be created can be time-reversed, and, in fact, we can time-permute the sequence of unitary operators describing the evolution in an arbitrary way. It is therefore both quantum noise and the absence of quantum fault tolerance that enable an arrow of time.”

Just for future reference, let’s “note that with quantum computers one can emulate a quantum evolution on an arbitrary geometry. For example, a complicated quantum evolution representing the dynamics of a four-dimensional lattice model could be emulated on a one-dimensional chain of qubits.

This would be vastly different from today’s experimental quantum physics, and it is also in tension with insights from physics, where witnessing different geometries supporting the same physics is rare and important. Since a universal quantum computer allows the breaking of the connection between physics and geometry, it is noise and the absence of quantum fault tolerance that distinguish physical processes based on different geometries and enable geometry to emerge from the physics.”

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I have proposed a theory which explains the preceding features, including the emergence of space. Let’s call it Sub Quantum Physics (SQP). The theory breaks a lot of sacred cows. Besides, it brings an obvious explanation for Dark Matter. If I am correct the Dark matter Puzzle is directly tied in with the Quantum Puzzle.

In any case, it is a delight to see in print part of what I have been severely criticized for saying for all too many decades… The gist of it all is that present day physics would be completely incomplete.

Revolutions spawn from, and contributes to, the revolutionary mood. It is no coincidence that many revolutionary ideas in science: Chemistry (Lavoisier), Biological Evolution (Lamarck), Lagrangians, Black Holes,, Fourier Analysis, Thermodynamics (Carnot), Wave Optics, (Young, Poisson), Ampere’s Electrodynamics spawned roughly at the same time and place, around the French Revolution.

In the Encyclopedie, under the term dimension Jean le Rond d’Alembert speculated that time might be considered a fourth dimension… if the idea was not too novel. Joseph Louis Lagrange in his ), wrote that: “One may view mechanics as a geometry of four dimensions…” (Theory of Analytic Functions, 1797.) The idea of spacetime is to view reality as a four dimensional manifold, something measured by the “Real Line” going in four directions.

There is, it turns out a huge problem with this: R, the real line, has what is called a separated topology: points have distinct neighborhoods. However, the QUANTUM world is not like that, not at all. Countless experiments, and the most basic logic, show this:

Reality Does Not Care About Speed, & The Relativity It Brings

Manifolds were defined by Bernhard Riemann in 1866 (shortly before he died, still young, of tuberculosis). A manifold is made of chunks (technically: neighborhoods), each of them diffeomorphic to a neighborhood in R^n (thus a deformed piece of R^n, see tech annex).

Einstein admitted that there was a huge problem with the “now” in physics (even if one confines oneself to his own set-ups in Relativity theories). Worse: the Quantum changes completely the problem of the “now”… Let alone the “here”.

— Hermann Minkowski, 1907, Einstein’s professor in Zurich concluded: “The views of space and time which I wish to lay before you have sprung from the soil of experimental physics, and therein lies their strength. They are radical. Henceforth space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality.”

This remark rests on Lorentz’s work, how to go from coordinates (x, t) to (x’, t’). In the simplest case:

C is the speed of light. Lorentz found one needed such transformations to respect electrodynamics. If v/c is zero (as it is if one suppose the speed v to be negligible relative to c, the speed of light infinite), one gets:

t = t’

x’ = x – vt

The first equation exhibits universal time: time does not depend upon the frame of reference. But notice that the second equation mixes space and time already. Thus, philosophically speaking, proclaiming “spacetime” could have been done before. Now, in so-called “General Relativity”, there are problems with “time-like” geodesics (but they would surface long after Minkowski’s death).

Another problem with conceptually equating time and space is that time is not space: space dimensions have a plus sign, time a minus sign (something Quantum Field Theory often ignores by putting pluses everywhere in computations)

In any case, I hope this makes clear that, philosophically, just looking at the equations, “spacetime” does not have to be an important concept.

And Quantum Physics seems to say that it is not: the QUANTUM INTERACTION (QI; my neologism) is (apparently, so far) INSTANTANEOUS (like old fashion time).

As we saw precedingly (“Can Space Be Faster Than Light“), the top cosmologists are arguing whether the speed of space can be viewed as faster than light. Call that the Cosmic Inflation Interaction (CII; it has its own hypothesized exchange particle, the “Inflaton”). We see that c, the speed of light is less than CII, and may, or may not be related to QI (standard Quantum Physics implicitly assumes that the speed of the Quantum Interaction QI is infinite).

One thing is sure: we are very far from TOE, the “Theory Of Everything”, which physicists anxious to appear as the world’s smartest organisms, with all the power and wealth to go with it, taunted for decades.

Patrice Ayme’

Tech Annex: R is the real line, RxR = R^2, the plane, RxRxR = R^3 the usual three dimensional space, etc. Spacetime was initially viewed as just RxRxRxR = R^4.]What does diffeomorphic mean? It means a copy which can be shrunk or dilated somewhat in all imaginable ways, perhaps (but without breaks, and so that all points can be tracked; a diffeomorphism does this, and so do all its derivatives).